“And we were off to the races. President Kennedy said we were going to the moon by 1969. Everybody knew it was not enough time, there was no way to get there that fast… safely. That’s the key word.
“There’s two ways we could have got to the moon. The way everybody assumed it would be done in the ’40s and ’50s was the piece-by-piece approach. Develop a ship something like the VentureStar, an SSTO, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. Start putting hardware and people into orbit. Build a space station. It could be huge by now if we’d started in 1958. Then build your moonship in orbit. Make it a ship like the Lunar Excursion Module, in that it will never land on Earth, but not like the Lunar Excursion Module in that you don’t throw it away after you’ve used it once. It returns to Earth’s orbit, refuels, and goes right back to the moon with more people. More people, because right there, right from the very first flight, we would have been on the moon to stay. Put up some shelters on the first landing, stay there a week or so. Your moonships start regular trips back and forth. In a couple years you’ve got a decent colony, a few hundred people. By about 1990 you’re sending people to Mars, by 2000 you’ve got ships on the way to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.
“That’s the way everybody figured it in engineering circles in 1958.”
Travis was up and pacing now, and he paused, getting his second wind. Obviously he had been angry about this for a long time.
“But there was another way to get to the moon. You’ve heard of ‘fast, cheap, and dirty?’ Call this the von Braun plan, fast, very expensive, and very dirty. But it was the only way to get there by December thirty-first, 1969.
“Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it’s his biggest ship. Come [163] to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World… but his third ship can’t land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic… and at the Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his shoulders.
“If that’s what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles.”
“Would that be so bad?” Dak asked.
“Not for the Seminoles,” Kelly said.
“The Apollo program was possibly the stupidest way of getting somewhere the human mind has yet achieved… but it was the only way to win the ‘race.’
“And the race took a toll beyond the money it squandered. It cost three astronauts their lives. They burned to death in a pure oxygen environment that was loaded with combustible material. Strapped in, the hatch bolted, those guys burned to death because there hadn’t been time to do the slow, methodical testing that should have been at the heart of the Apollo program.
“Don’t get me wrong. I am in awe of the pioneers who flew in those things, and the people who built them. Nobody will ever see a Saturn 5 launch again, but believe me, it was an incredible sight.
“The whole thing, from Sputnik to Neil Armstrong, was done using methods we usually only see in wartime. It wasn’t so much a race as a war. Look at the Manhattan Project. Time is critical, money is no object. We need the bomb now. So, if there’s six different ways to refine uranium 235 out of ore, which way do we try first? Answer: Try all six, all at once.
“It worked. We got the bomb.
“The Apollo managers got all the money they needed because we were at war with Russia. Never got to shooting at each other, luckily, but it was war.
“Then, suddenly, we’ve made it to the moon… and what do we do for Act Two? Why… nothing. Nothing much, anyway. The public found the whole show boring. The funding dried up. We launched five [164] more… and those guys were incredibly lucky, because the LEM functioned perfectly every time, something we had no right to expect. Even so, we almost lost Apollo 13.
“So when we were building a space plane, the next logical step, what happens? There’s not enough money to build the ship we should have built, a very big, piloted, first stage that flies back to the Cape after the launch, mated to something that would have looked a lot like the original Shuttle. Instead, we give the Shuttle a pair of solid fuel boosters that fall in the ocean. It’s madness to put a solid fuel booster on a manned craft. Once you light a solid booster you can’t turn it off if something goes wrong.
“So something went wrong-with the booster, notice-seventy seconds into Challenger’s last flight, and seven more people die.
“Hurry-up is death, when you’re dealing with rockets. So is under-funding.”
“An’ now,” Jubal said, “now it happening all over ’gain.”
Travis threw himself down into his seat, puffed out his cheeks.
“It appears so. The powers that be decided we needed to go to Mars, if the Chinese were going. And soon. Hang the cost. Hang the engineering quibbles.” He looked dubiously at his cousin.
“Tell me this, Jubal. You say we can build us a spaceship, we can go out there and get them home if they get into trouble. And we can do it all-in five months. Isn’t this another space race? Aren’t we likely to build something that will blow up in our faces?”
“Not my Squeezer machine,” Jubal said. “It won’t blow up, I guar-on-tee!”
“Okay, I believe you. But what about all the other things we’d have to do? You really think we have time?”
“Don’ know. Maybe not.”
“This race is a little different, Travis,” Kelly said. “This time there’s no choice as to whether we take it slow and careful. Lives are at stake if we don’t build the rocket.”
“We can try it a step at a time,” I said, and Kelly looked sharply at me. “We can go test the rocket tomorrow, like you said. If it blows up, well, that’s that. But we tried.” Kelly gave me a short, relieved nod.
[165] “Makes sense,” Dak said. Alicia grabbed his hand.
“We do that t’ing tomorrow, Travis,” Jubal said. “Jus’ de test.”
Travis looked at each of us in turn, and sighed.
“Just the test,” he agreed. “Come on, I want to start in an hour.”
IT TOOK AN hour and a half, but we got rolling by that afternoon. I called home and told them I’d be out all night. Mom said things were going smoothly, not to worry.
By nightfall we were passing through Miami.
17
WE TURNED EAST on the Tamiami Trail and drove on into the night. We were in three vehicles: Travis’s Hummer, Blue Thunder, and a Ferrari demonstrator Kelly had chosen because it would piss off her dad to find it gone all night and the next day. The thing would go like a bomb, but what with the traffic we picked up around Palm Beach we never got a chance to open her up. The long, low, infernal machine seemed to be pouting most of the way.
It was one in the morning when we pulled into Everglades City, which was an exaggeration if there ever was one. Most of the few hundred inhabitants were snug in bed as we bounced over mud and shell roads until we stopped in front of an old Airstream trailer set up on cinder blocks. The porch light was on. Flowering plants hung from the awning and from poles.
As Travis pulled the Hummer in beside the rusting hulk of a pickup truck, a dog I later learned was a black-and-tan coonhound lifted his head and bounded down the steps. Half a dozen more came out from under the deck. The dogs didn’t bark, but circled the vehicles nervously. Travis held his hand out and the dominant male sniffed it, then started running in circles, wagging his tail. On the other side of the Hummer [167] Jubal was getting out, laughing and tussling with two other dogs, who were so happy to see him I thought they might have a little urinary accident, but they didn’t.